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French Moves, de Felicia McCarren obtient la De la Torre Bueno Prize

FRENCH MOVES :
Outstanding Publication Award 2014, Congress on Research in Dance
De la Torre Bueno Prize 2013, Society of Dance History Scholars

CORD’s Outstanding Publication Award recognizes notable work in dance research from the previous calendar year. The Awards Committee has selected Felicia McCarren’s French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop for its 2014 award. Reviewers praised Dr. McCarren’s rigor in demonstrating that hip hop in France is not an example of U.S. cultural imperialism so much as an example of France’s ability to absorb cultural influences and make them its own. In particular, she is praised for insightful close analyses of the ways immigrant communities take up urban dance forms to trouble French discourses of universality and equality, even as hip hop has become part of French national culture.

Quatrième de couverture: For more than two decades, le hip hop has shown France’s « other » face: danced by minorities associated with immigration and the suburbs, it has channeled rage against racism and unequal opportunity and offered a movement vocabulary for the expression of the multicultural difference that challenges the universalist discourse of the Republic.

French hip-hoppers subscribe to black U.S. culture to articulate their own difference but their mouv’ developed differently, championed by a Socialist cultural policy as part of the patrimoine culturel, instituted as a pedagogy and supported as an art of the banlieue. In the multicultural mix of « Arabic » North African, African and Asian forms circulating with classical and contemporary dance performance in France, if hip hop is positioned as a civic discourse, and hip hop dancer as legitimate employment, it is because beyond this political recuperation, it is a figural language in which dancers express themselves differently, figure themselves as something or someone else.

French hip hop develops into concert dance not through the familiar model of a culture industry, but within a Republic of Culture; it nuances an « Anglo-Saxon » model of identity politics with a « francophone » post-colonial identity poetics and grants its dancers the statut civil of artists, technicians who develop and transmit body-based knowledge.

This book— the first in English to introduce readers to the French mouv’ —analyzes the choreographic development of hip hop into la danse urbaine, touring on national and international stages, as hip hoppeurs move beyond the banlieue, figuring new forms within the mobility brought by new media and global migration.

Felicia McCarren est Professor, Department of French and Italian, Tulane University, New Orleans
Newcomb College Institute, Advisor on Arts and Humanities Projects